When Jeff Bezos came to Washington in September to talk to the Economic Club, a well-heeled audience of 1,500 of the capital's movers and shakers, he called out only a few people by name: his parents, Jackie and Mike, and one Amazon executive, Teresa Carlson.
"Teresa's here. Where are you Teresa?" Bezos said, looking out into the crowd for Carlson, the company's head of cloud services for the public sector. "Everybody in Washington knows Teresa."
He might be right.
For people in government, Carlson is the face of Amazon Web Services. The cloud hosting business has turned into a revenue juggernaut for Amazon since its founding 14 years ago, earning $6.68 billion in the third quarter. AWS, as it's known, claims a third of the worldwide cloud market — but its biggest growth opportunity right now may come from the US government.